


twisting fate

by hoosierbitch



Series: Teenage!Clint 'verse [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Hope, Loneliness, M/M, Sacrifice, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 15:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3330290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They send a teenager with a bow to kill her.</p><p>(eta: this series will likely remain a WiP)</p>
            </blockquote>





	twisting fate

**Author's Note:**

> This can be read as a stand-alone, but you will get more out of it if you read the first part as well. 
> 
> Credit where credit is due: Shadowen is an amazing, thorough, encouraging beta. Any remaining mistakes are due to goblins.

They send a teenager with a bow to kill her.

As she is a teenager herself, with a preference for daggers over guns, she doesn’t have much room to judge, but she had expected at least a full tactical team. She feels vaguely insulted, despite the fact that he has gotten the jump on her.

He’s sitting in her apartment when she gets back from her latest job, bow raised and ready. She’s got blood in her hair and dripping down from the knife sheaths hidden on her wrists, and there’s blood soaked into the black fabric of her clothes. When his eyes scan swiftly over the drying blood, she discards the possibility of denying her identity or pretending she is innocent.

He says, “Hi.” Then he nods towards the door. “Come inside? I’ll shoot you either way, but your neighbors will make less of a fuss if you bleed out in here instead of out in the hallway.”

She steps inside, because she will always buy herself more time, no matter what the cost. She closes the door slowly. His eyes narrow as he makes a minute correction to his angle, and in that intense concentration she sees her escape options begin to vanish like so much smoke.

Her gaze shifts to the chiseled tip of his arrow, and her words slip out without her permission. “I’m not finished yet,” she whispers. It is in English. She wants him to understand her. She wants someone to know. She will have no gravestone, no records will be printed bearing her real name, and no one will note her with anything other than relief.

Here at the end, she finds she wants to be remembered as more than just a ghost with a weapon.

Her American accent is imperfect and the only thought that crosses her mind is, _My last words were pronounced poorly_.

She already feels like a statue, an empty body, so she does not move even when his aim falters. He tilts his head to the right, looking at her eyes now and not her hips and hands, watching for any signs of threat. She can see an earpiece when he cocks his head further to the side. She wonders if, in this brief reprieve, there is any chance for her to shift her wariness into seduction. She calculates the likelihood that she could spring a dagger from her wrist sheath before he releases the draw of his bowstring. The odds do not favor her.

“What do you need to finish?” he asks, still looking at her eyes.

She shrugs. She feels like laughing. After all the pain, all the training, all the things she never got to have—after all of that, this is how she goes? Satisfying someone else’s pointless curiosity? “My mission. I only need seventeen more days.”

“That’s very specific.”

“I know what I want. And I know how to get it,” she says, putting a softer murmur into her voice. The archer cocks his head to the right again and smirks at her.

“So what is your mission then, Ms. Widow?”

“Istan Blochnik,” she says, because at least this way maybe, months from now, Blochnik will meet an arrow when he gets home with blood on his hands.  

“I know that name,” he says slowly. “I—I’ve seen his picture. He’s a child slavery ringleader, right? He’s been on the most wanted list for years. His mugshot’s up on my friend’s wall.” That makes little sense. “My friend’s got bad taste in art, so he just puts up pictures of the people he wants to kill,” he explains.

“I like your friend,” she says.

The archer’s head tilts again, and his lips move like he’s about to say something, like the voice in his ear is holding a conversation that he doesn’t know how to participate in. “I like him too,” he says. “I like him a lot.”

“I have committed unforgivable crimes,” she says. She knows her body does not look particularly vulnerable or sexy right now; she can’t seem to get past _afraid_. “You are right to kill me. But please—” Her hope, it seems, her hope or her self-preservation or the bullheaded stubbornness that had demanded her freedom and refused to yield it, has not yet deserted her. “I seek revenge, but it is not only for myself. Can you understand what that is? Can you give me time to make it right?”

He breaks eye contact and does not answer. She nods and closes her eyes, willing her body not to tense. If he goes for the gut shot, she will be in pain soon enough. It will take her a long time to die. Perhaps he will be merciful, and use more than one arrow on her.

The pause is almost too long. Then she hears the arrow cutting through the air, hears the vibration of the bowstring coming to rest, gasps when the arrow meets its mark. Then she opens her eyes. The only blood on her body is the blood that she had spilled earlier in the night, still drying on her skin.

The arrow is buried in the floor. Piercing the thin carpet and dug deep into the wood underneath. Shattered around the shaft are the remains of his earpiece. The one-sided conversation that had drawn his attention from her, the conversation he had chosen not to participate in, is over. In the silence, she breathes.

Her daggers are in her hands before he can string another arrow.

“Do me a favor,” he says, defenseless except for a wavering grin. “Don’t kill me?”

“You—you didn’t kill me,” she says, reeling, stepping back so that her shoulders press against the door. He has left himself vulnerable to her. Stupid, stupid boy.

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” he says, which must be an American expression she hasn’t learned; it seems like an eye for an eye would leave the world one-eyed. Also, who trades in eyes? “If you want to get out of here, run now,” he says. She takes a slow step forward and looks him over. He’s staring at his ruined earpiece. He looks sad. He expects to die.

“You were sent here to kill me.”

“I don’t follow orders well,” he says. “And they knew that from the start.” His shoulders are slumped, and his eyes are tight with tension, more expression on his face now than when he was about to kill her.

“You have failed your masters,” she says. She herself had not disobeyed orders until the very last one. It had taken years for her bravery to overcome her training. Then, because tonight seems to be made for unexpected reversals, she says, “I can help you hide from them.” Her accent is still wrong, and it takes a moment for comprehension to dawn on his face.

He looks up at her, and one of his hands reaches up to his right ear, listening for the voice that isn’t there anymore. “You wanted seventeen days?” he asks. She nods. She will not be ready to die until she completes this mission, this mission she had made for herself. The archer shrugs. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

She stares at him a moment longer, then puts her knives away. “You are a very strange person,” she says in Russian.

His Russian is terrible, but he says, “Run. I’ll follow you.” That, she understands.

*

Only five blocks of sprinting later he tells her to stop. “I promise I’m not hitting on you,” he says, before taking off his shirt. She pulls out her knives. “Awesome. Could you use one of those to get the tracker out of my back?”

He turns around. There’s a thin white scar on his right shoulder blade. She digs in, and he cries out before biting down on the t-shirt he'd been twisting in his hands. They leave the small piece of metal in a puddle of his blood, which adds to the red mess already drying on her hands and clothes.

*

She runs as fast as she can, and he keeps up. That makes her curious. It’s hours before they stop, and he’s pale, sweaty, and tired, but not ready to drop.

“What should I call you?” he asks. They're crouched on a fire escape, waiting for the sun to set before they make another trip across some rooftops.

“Ms. Widow,” she throws back at him.

He snorts. It’s stupid and silly and makes her stare at him. “I’m Clint,” he says. He holds out a hand, and, when he doesn’t lower it, she shakes it. Her hand is small in his. There’s still blood on her wrists, and he winces when his arm moves. “In the olden days, people used to shake hands to make sure that the other person wasn’t hiding weapons under their sleeves,” he says. He’s speaking quietly, so she doesn’t tell him to shut up. “That doesn’t work as well these days, does it?” She double-checks his body language (still relaxed, but ready to run), and pops out one of her knives from its wrist sheath. He hums admiringly. “Pretty.”

She narrows her eyes. It’s not often that a man compliments her weaponry before complimenting her.

“Time to run again,” she says in Russian.

He nods, take a breath, and says, “After you.”

*

She hasn’t worked with a partner in a long time and hadn’t ever planned on doing so again. Her hideaway was designed just for her: one bed, enough canned food to keep one person going for three days, one first aid kit.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he says quickly, when he sees her eyes flick between him and the mattress.

“Yes,” she says, watching every move he makes as he lays his bow by the door and walks away from it with his hands spread open at his sides.

For all his dissembling, he is still an unknown. He is still a threat. His gamble that she would let him live, when he’d shot his arrow into the floor instead of her body, had been a foolish one. He has turned his back to her multiple times. Perhaps he has been intentionally giving her openings to kill him so that she will lower her guard.

She can’t think of any reason why he would let her live, except to lull her into a false sense of security so that he could—what? Learn of her plan to kill Blotchnik? She’d told him that of her own free, foolish will. Perhaps he does want to bed her and has just been hiding any hint of that desire from her.

She stitches the cut in his shoulder. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t complain, and he thanks her when she ties it off and cuts the thread. She puts glue and butterfly bandages over it too, because if he has to draw his bow, those stitches are all going to pop out.

They take turns washing in the small kitchen sink. She retreats to her bed and watches him.  He’s moving stiffly now but is still quiet on his feet. Being silent is habit for him, too. His face is drawn tight.

She wonders if he wants to go back. She thinks he’s smart enough to find his way back to the small apartment she'd been squatting in; he could pull his arrow from the floor, see if there was any chance the earpiece was fixable. It seems unlikely that whoever sent him after her would leave the apartment unwatched.

What must be waiting for him, if he turns to retrace his steps? What’s stopping him from leaving her?

He sits in the corner opposite the door as the light dies, his quiver in his lap, examining his arrows one by one.

He thanks her when she gives him a can of black beans and a can opener.

When he finishes, he says, “Good night, Ms. Widow.”

She throws him a pillow and pretends to sleep.

*

She dyes her hair blonde in a motel in Minsk; he cuts his into a mohawk and dyes it purple. “Coulson’s gonna hate this,” he says ruefully, rubbing a hand through it and staring at himself in the mirror. “Or— Fuck. Never mind.” He speaks in English when they're alone; she sticks to Russian. In public she mostly speaks for both of them. He doesn’t seem to mind. Most men would.

“He is your friend,” she says, painting her fingernails a pastel orange. Details like that are important to undercover work; people on the run tend not to take care of themselves very well.

“Was,” Clint says.

“He is the one with the pictures on his wall?”

“Yes.”

“I like him,” she says again, curious to see Clint’s face twist in emotional pain again. He glances up at her and smiles.

“He'd get a kick out of you, too.”

“He'd kick me?” she says in startled English.

“No. He'd like you. You'd get along. Like a house on fire,” he says. “Huh. I wonder how that saying got started. Burning houses are generally a bad thing”

“They are pretty, though,” she says.

*

He doesn’t hit on her. She barely talks to him, even though she’s never had somebody around so long before, and she keeps wanting to _say_ things. She wants to tell him that he mispronounces _thank you_ and that he should be less obvious when he checks for tails in reflective surfaces. They travel through towns he cannot name, and she wants to tell him their history, wants to describe the architecture with words she has memorized but never used. She wants to tell him that Blochnik is the eighth and final person on her list and that she doesn’t know what she’s going to do when she crosses off his name.

On day fifteen they lose sight of Blochnik completely. She swears in Russian for a long time, with a streak of creativity she hadn’t known to expect from herself. When she finishes, breathless from cursing, Clint (Clint Barton, Hawkeye, who used to work for SHIELD, who used to live in a circus, and who dispenses information about himself with reckless ease) looks at her with a shocked smile and says, “You’re amazing.”

It’s the first time he’s complimented _her_ , not her weaponry or her skillset. She hasn’t let a man do that since she left the Red Room, not when she could help it. She’s too angry to assess whether that makes him a threat or a fool.

Blochnik’s in the wind, and her plans are going to have to change. She doesn’t know how to alter mission parameters by herself. They had not wanted to teach them that.

She snarls, kicks out, and has Clint on the ground in less than a second, her knees pinning his arms at his sides. His quiver is trapped under his back and makes his chest arch forward, his neck one long stretch of pale skin.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his Russian tangled and breathless. “I’m sorry.” He switches to English when she puts a knife to his throat. “Let me make it up to you?” His nervous gaze flickers from her eyes to her knives. Then he licks his lips and tilts his head to the side. He is submitting to her in a way no one has ever done before. “I can make it good.”

He is offering sex in exchange for his life. She has never been on this side of the transaction before. She leans down slowly, testing them both, and bites his lip punishingly hard. He grunts, but doesn’t move. “You would do anything I ask,” she says, pulling back.

“Yeah. I’m—I’ve been told I’m good at this. It’s not my first rodeo,” he says.

“What’s a rodeo?”

“It’s a—never mind. It just means...” He takes a deep breath, his ribs expanding between her legs. She is torn between the desire to throw her knives across the room or make him bleed. “I’m good at following orders. I’ll do whatever you want,” he says.

“The first night we met, you said you were bad at following orders.”

“Not these kinds of orders,” he says quietly. The bleakness in his eyes is frightening.

There is a sickness inside of her, and she sees it in him like a mirror. Seconds later, she’s across the room, her knives ready to strike, breathing hard.

Slowly, he levers himself up to sitting. He waits until her breathing calms down. She forces her body not to shake.

“I would—I will—never,” she says.

He smiles his crooked smile at her. “If you change your mind, I won’t say no.”

She shakes her head. His Russian is poor; maybe he hadn’t understood her. “You have been hurt,” she says slowly. “I have also been hurt.” She waits until he nods before she continues. “I have committed many crimes,” she says, “but not that. I punish the people who do that. I kill the ones who did that to me,” she says, her fingers tightening around her knives. She made a list. Blochnik is last name on it. “If I hurt you, I don’t...”

“I could have gone after the guys who hurt me,” he says, after a long silence, staring at his hands. “Coulson would’ve helped. He probably wouldn’t have killed them. He’d have stopped them from doing it again at least. I don’t—” He shrugs and looks at her, his head tilted, still waiting for the voice in his ear to say something to him. “You're a lot stronger than I am.”

*

On the twenty-fifth day, they get Blochnik alone. She cuts his throat with one of Clint’s arrows.

*

On the twenty-sixth day, they’re on a train, making their way to Italy. She buys them food from the dining trolley, brings it back to their reserved car, and says, “I don’t know what to do now.” She is still trying out trust. She offers her ignorance to him and waits to see what he will do.

He hums, then says, “Me neither.”

They stare out the window. It’s night, and past the darkness, they can see warmly lit houses. They can see families eating dinner and watching television and doing the normal things she has been told people do in homes. “Your friend,” she says, even though she knows now that his name is Phil Coulson. “The one with the wall? Do you remember any of the other posters there, of people he wished would die?”

He looks at her, and for the first time, a real smile graces his lips. He uncurls from the ball he had drawn himself into. The space is small but she finds she doesn’t mind his ankles pressed against her calves. “I sure do.”

*

They decide to stay off the grid for a few weeks to avoid detection. SHIELD, the organization that had set him on her trail and that seems to be less evil than she was taught to believe, has many spies.

They room in a lot of youth hostels. Sometimes they are brother and sister, sometimes they are friends (one of them usually pretends to be gay), sometimes they are boyfriend and girlfriend (who touch only carefully, only in public, only above clothes and with an eye on each other’s hands for the _Stop what you're doing_ finger flick. He doesn’t like her arm around his waist; she doesn’t like her hands being held; they both like bumping hips and shoulders and touching each other’s hair).

They get backpacks and supplies in Switzerland and go into mountains that are so high and become so cold that she thinks that they will die. She speaks only in English now, and he speaks only in Russian. They break out of each other’s tongues to correct pronunciation. The foreign language helps her with the unfamiliarity of talking. He shares information with the ease of someone who no longer has a use for secrets. There is a familiar hopelessness in his eyes that dogs every step he takes.

She tells him her real name on a night when they are pressed body-to-body for warmth in their small tent as wolves howl in the distance. He thanks her in Russian, and she tells him again that he is pronouncing it wrong.

“I think it was my birthday a week ago,” he says, minutes later. She doesn’t need for him to talk; she can tell by his shivers that he is still alive. “I’m nineteen. Happy birthday me.”

“I think I am seventeen,” she says. They shrug at the same time.

“Do you have a day? That you celebrate on?”

“No.”

“We should make one up. Next year—” He stops, and she pulls her hands tighter against her sides, hands tucked in her armpits, his arms wrapped around her. “If we're still alive and hanging out together, we should make up a birthday and celebrate it. You get to have cake. It’s awesome.”

“I don’t like cake.”

He fakes a gasp and coughs on the end of it. “You wound me,” he says, with a raspy chuckle. “You don’t like cake? I bet you don’t like chocolate, either. I bet you hate puppies.”

She thinks about it. “Chocolate is poisonous to dogs.”

“You can like puppies and chocolate separately.”

“A puppy can be your birthday present to me, then,” she decides. “And you may get cake for yourself.”

“I get cake on your birthday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re awesome.”

He says things like that now, personal compliments, even when their bodies are close. She thinks about smiling, but he can’t see her face, so instead she just relaxes her expression and burrows closer to him, wrapping their blankets tighter.

*

By the time they reach the border, Clint’s smile is still sad and steady, but he has developed a cough and she is thinner than she has ever been.

“We are not so good at taking care of ourselves, maybe,” she says, as they lie on their backs, pressed side-to-side on a high ledge in a drafty cathedral, watching the sun slowly descend through a stained glass window.

He shrugs. “We have our list of people to kill. We could find backers and make money from that. Or we could steal shit. I’m good at that.” She is good at stealing, too. They’ve picked pockets occasionally, but crime draws attention. Murder draws more. Clint shifts carefully and pokes her in the side. “If you could be anywhere, where would you be?”

Her mind is a blank. Blank like Swiss mountains, snow white, with no drops of red or charcoal eyes.

“You could be anywhere you want,” he says, minutes later.

It is an easier question to ask than it is to answer. “I grew up in a…” Her English is good, but there are words that she thinks might not exist for Clint. “A military school. They trained us. Taught us to kill, to be killers, and to do what we were told. They built our minds into machines.”

“But you left,” he says, his voice a mix of sadness and awe. “So you—you want to be somewhere that no one controls you anymore?”

She sits up and rests her back against the wall. It is covered in a beautiful fresco, and the ancient paint falls in dusty flakes around them when they move. She rests her chin on her knee—so bony it hurts a little—and says, “I do not know that I am built for that.” The orange and pinks of the sunset have turned to red and purples. Below them, someone is lighting candles in golden chandeliers that make the shadows dance. It is easier to be truthful when they are hidden. She wears the darkness like a mask, one that she has let Clint see through. “I would like to be with you,” she says. “I would like to always have food, and a bed that is always only mine. I would like to choose which orders I follow, and which ones I do not.”

She turns her face on her knee and looks at him. His face is mottled green and blue from the glass, like he is underwater. “I would like to buy clothes that are just for me, not for me when I am pretending to be someone else. I would like for my hair to be its natural color.” She knows he is a sniper, but when he is waiting and watching her, she does not feel like a target. “I would like to be...” She has not used this word in English; maybe not in Russian, either. It doesn’t seem as impossible as it used to. “Safe. And since I am only good to be a soldier, to be a spy, I would like to be a soldier in a good fight. To be on the right side of it.”

She turns away from him.

“You want to work for SHIELD,” he says, like he'd already known her answer.

“SHIELD gave that to you,” she says, feeling slightly ashamed and angry. “And I am better than you are.”

He scratches at the back of his head. “They also want to kill you, but you could probably convince them not to do that.”

“Coulson and I would get on like houses on fire,” she reminds him.

“Fury'd probably catch ablaze, too. Maybe even Hill.” Clint is smiling. She knows some things about these people. Clint always has that smile when he speaks about them. That smile is very sad.

“What is there about them that we need to fear?”

“Nothing, if you’re careful. You’re good enough to negotiate a deal. Just bring some solid intel with you to trade. They'll take information in exchange for overlooking some assassination and treason.” She nods. That makes sense. “Coulson will even make you muffins instead of cake for your birthdays.” He is wracked with a coughing fit loud enough to give them away. He covers his mouth, and she puts her hand on his shoulder, wishing she knew what to do. She waits, once his cough dies away, but he doesn’t say anything else.

“You talk like you're not going to be with me.”

He nods. “They—they didn’t so much recruit me, the way I told you. And you're right; I’m not as good as you. They don’t need me as much.” He is Clint Barton, sniper, friend of Phil Coulson, brother of Barney Barton. She had thought, after the secrets they shared in the cold, when they thought they were going to die, that she knew what he had to hide. “Remind me—the word for prison in Russian?” he asks. She tells him. “Coulson...bought me from there. And he said he would return me if I failed. I—” He laughs, and it ends with bitter echoes around them. “There wasn’t much of a chance that I wouldn’t fuck it up.”

The voice in his ear. The earpiece he’d shattered. The way he’d looked at her before telling her to run. The fact he hadn’t intended to follow.

“If you do not go, I do not go,” she says. He opens his mouth to say something, something that would sound like the shards of colored glass that right now is making them unreal and beautiful. “You are my brother.” The expression on his face does not change. “I am like you,” she says, because there are parts of his stories that had been missing that make sense now. “But you and I—we are not the kind of people who leave our brothers behind.”

They stay in the cathedral, their shadows dancing on fading paint, until the sun rises and they are only themselves once again.

*

They stop at the first payphone they see. Clint dials a number from memory and whispers a string of letters and numbers in a hoarse voice before handing her the phone.

“This is Director Fury,” says an angry male voice. “What the fuck is going on?”

“This is Natasha Romanov,” she says, holding tight to Clint’s hand, hoping he will stay. “I would like to make a deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> [also: you can follow me [on tumblr](hoosierbitch.tumblr.com) for ficlets and puppies.]


End file.
